Ethiopia and Kenya battling it out in the Olympic 10K Final in Sydney, 2000, Credit: Wikimedia

A few months ago I wrote about five African countries doing big things in clean energy. It got lots of good feedback – including comments from a number of people from Ethiopia asking why I hadn’t featured their country. I wanted to make sure to write about Ethiopia as well as what I’d been hearing about out of Kenya. Since we often think of the move to clean energy as a “race”, I thought a fun way to do it would be to have the two best distance running countries in the world – Ethiopia and Kenya – square off against each other.

For those of you that don’t follow the sport, many of the best distance runners in the world are from Kenya or Ethiopia. In men’s track and field, a Kenyan or Ethiopian athlete has run 7 of the top 10 10K and the top 10 5K times in history. In cross country, you’d need to go back to 1980 to find the last time one of those countries didn’t win the team championship. On the women’s side, the countries are nearly as dominant. Kenyan or Ethiopian female runners have 6 of the fastest 10K and 5K times and one of those countries has won the team cross country championship every year since 1994. There is no major sport in the world where two countries are so dominant.

So lets see how they are going when it comes to the clean energy race.